Re: On distro users feedback

[John Williams <john williams lists gmail com>]

It continually amazes me when producers of market offerings ("vendors")
refer to feedback as "informal" or "anecdotal".  As if "formal" feedback
(I presume people are referring to focus groups and surveys here) gave
you any better information.

The only deficiency of the "informal" user feedback is that it is not
easily categorised (as with surveys that provide predefined answers) or
that there is no-one analysing a limited amount of qualitative
information like in a one-off focus group.

The closest we have come to "managing" user feedback is a couple of
pages on live.gnome.org and "feature request" bugs in various bugzillas.
What we need is a system a level above copying and pasting from an IRC
window into a page on l.g.o, a system that is incredibly easy to use
(i.e. I have an idea, or I've just read something on a blog, now I just
need to do X and it will be recorded for analysis by the GNOME Marketing
Team).  The only question is: what would X look like?

Propositions:
1. Bugzilla is to time-sucking for this kind of thing (you need to think
and hunt for the right place to put things)

2. Qualitative data analysis needs humans.  It can't be automated.  But
a "first cut" as assigning feedback items to categories can be
automated, and humans can fix the screw-ups later.

3. It shouldn't require any additional software to be installed.  The
system should be able to accept input via email or teh innarweb.

4. It would require an initial sprint to sift the data we have and
assign them to categories, but from then on the workload would decrease
markedly as categorisation becomes more "automatic" (either humans more
quickly recognise recurring themes, or software becomes smarter).


OK, now I'm out of ideas.  I suppose I am thinking of a page something
like feedback.gnome.org/telluswhatyouthink where people could just past
or write stuff in a text box, and possible some ability to attach binary
data.  And an email address feedback gnome org for the same purpose.  I
admit these ideas are vague and mundane.  I suppose the geeks could get
excited at writing the automatic categorisation (Bayesian learning,
similar to spam filters would be the go I suppose) software.

I can see the outputs of such an effort being of such value to distros
(and even proprietary software vendors) that they would be willing to
either pay for it or pay someone to work on it.



On Wed, 2007-09-26 at 16:37 -0400, Ken VanDine wrote:
> As a distro developer, I can say you are right.  We get lots of
> informal feedback from our users.  For example... with 2.20 we had
> dozens of people complaining they couldn't figure out how to change
> the theme.
> 
> Suggestions for getting this feedback to people that can do something
> about it?  I really don't have one... this sort of thing tends to be
> very informal, irc, forums, etc.  Hard to channel that back... and
> avoid noise.  But I am interested in helping out.
> 
> --Ken
> 
> On 9/26/07, Lucas Rocha <lucasr gnome org> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Every time we release a new major version of GNOME, I have this habit
> > of googling in search of comments, reviews and discussions about our
> > new release. In general, I find:
> >
> >  * User comments and blog posts about specific changes and new features
> >  * Distro developer opinions about how we should or shouldn't handle
> > certain issues
> >  * Discussions in mailing lists and web forums about the new release
> >
> > In the middle of all the (usual and useless) noise, it's very common
> > to see things like:
> >
> >  * "I don't understand why bug X is not fixed since release Y"
> >  * "Why do they keep this crappy way of doing X?"
> >  * "I really miss Z in GNOME"
> >
> > And a big part of this feedback happens inside the distro communities.
> > Well, it's a known fact that end-users don't use "GNOME". What they
> > see/perceive is "Ubuntu", "Fedora", "Debian", "OpenSuse", "Mandriva",
> > and so on. Therefore, most of the real end-user feedback happens in
> > the distro scope and I have this feeling that we're not really aware
> > about the whole mass of feedback that happens out there.
> >
> > So, I think we should talk with our distributors in order to find
> > efficient, lightweight and smart ways of exposing/transfering this
> > user feedback from distros to GNOME. Also, we could use this
> > opportunity to get feedback from distro developers as well.
> >
> > I have some ideas about how to make this happen but I'd like to know
> > the opinion of you, marketing fellows, first. My first-step-plan is to
> > (maybe) schedule an IRC meeting with members of GNOME Packaging Team
> > and other people involved with the distro communities to discuss some
> > ideas and know what they think.
> >
> > Comments?
> >
> > --lucasr
> > --
> > marketing-list mailing list
> > marketing-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
> >
> 
> 
> -- 
> Ken VanDine
> http://ken.vandine.org